My mother gave my daughter a cuckoo clock for her third birthday. The cuckoo was my suggestion, and this was an aberration. I have trouble with routine; the idea of something predictable happening hour after hour makes me miserable. Heralded by the recorded sounds of a running brook, the bird emerges. We watch and clap. My daughter is delighted; she wants it again and again. Some would say that constancy in life is a good thing, a touch of regularity in this imperfect world.
But time is tricky: it’s either for or against you; it has trouble with neutrality. Four years of college seemed interminable, and suddenly then it was over. I washed dishes at a Maine inn that summer, waiting impatiently for the career muse to lead me to salvation, to Wall Street, Madison Avenue, or Quito. At twenty-one, I was 100% potential energy—the ball at the top of the slide. Applying basic physics, once I got moving, I figured it’d be pretty fast going. That’s what I feared: this incredible momentum, a single trajectory, and someday, standing at the bottom, looking back up, regretfully.
The innkeeper’s daughter was my age, and had just been unhitched by her fiancé. We sat on my porch at night and read stories about Maine and Manhattan, stories I’d written in the fog of June. When fall threatened, I went back to New York City with her. We found an apartment and I went to an employment agency, baited by a glamorous job description. My friend spent hours over beer with me trying to find an honest enough answer to the question, “So, why do you want to go into advertising?” I took my first typing test, went to an interview in the “lipstick building," then fled from the plasterboard walls, off-gassing carpets, and automated phone systems in my blistering pumps.
I once tried to list all the jobs I’d had before I graduated; I got to thirty, but every so often, I remember one that I’m sure I’d forgotten when making my list, so there is no complete accounting. I read Christie’s catalog of china soup tureens to a blind writer on Park Avenue; I assisted a fashion photographer and learned about Dektol and cellulite; I answered phones at an art gallery, surrounded by Stellas, and made a feed bowl of oats and seeds for the owner every noon. When I returned, I worked in a bookstore. I got fifty percent off, free magazines, and found myself surrounded by kids my age who are, no doubt, now holding tenure-track positions at prestigious colleges. I snuck around, reading the books my co-workers were consuming, and thought that I’d found heaven. Late in the fall, I discovered architecture.
An architect’s product is space; it is a wordless world that was reluctant to take me in. It seduced because it was foreign: something I couldn’t talk or write my way through. I spent years letting go of language, allowing the drawing to speak, and then to making it speak for me. I earned entry through perseverance and practice; architecture played hard-to-get, but occupied me entirely. This affair with architecture does not end, though we are opposites. It is silent and I am not; it is slow and I am impatient. I am a stickler for using the correct word, while architecture feels free to co-opt “program” and “volume” and “sublime” and contort their meanings beyond recognition.
I approached architecture from different angles. I framed a Maine house one fall, took studio classes in different cities, and worked for a former architect who went into project management. I married and got a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania. I traveled. We moved to Cambridge and I found a job in a medium sized firm. Now, after five years of practice, as I am about to get licensed, I am rediscovering my passion for words. Just as in art, I never enjoyed creating something from nothing. I needed rules, at least a site, from which I could start. When I write about buildings, what architects say and what they do, I am an activist, an observer, an editor, and a proselytizer. I have reframed my native tongue through study of a visual language.
I believe architecture is powerful. It is part of a continuum that crosses generational, geographic, and stylistic boundaries. Buildings comprise our physical memory. They make up our cities, shape the land, and create or destroy community. They are our public countenance and our private thoughts. Architecture and writing meet at a spellbinding place— solitary arts for public consumption, reinforcing each other, feeding each other. I practice them alone, best at night, when the house is quiet and dark. Time is languid. It lingers at two, drifts into three, and at four, I am warm, accomplished, asleep.
The cuckoo calls to us hourly. I pick up Samara and we count the cuckoos together while I study his miniature chalet, imagining it nestled into an Austrian mountainside. Behind his closed doors, my daughter has told me, he plays the piano. My mother worries that the cuckoo is lonely. Maybe he cleans all day. Maybe he hosts lavish parties with good food and witty repartee, excusing himself for his brief hourly stint with the phrase, “It’s a living.” This clock is more than a clock. It is a home, a baroque piece of architecture for a tiny, punctual bird. Words, visions spoken aloud, have brought these things to life and made them precious. Which explains my passion for the moment when language and design intersect.
